Abelard, His Logic and Ethics

Originally the final paper of the PHIL111 course by Panos Eliopoulos in the summer semester of 2020.

Peter Abelard (1079–21 April 1142) was a very unique philosopher and theologian (a term he coined) of the 12th century. Even though he was not as well received for his theological ideas, he would consider himself one, especially at the end of his life (as a Christian, he uses many scriptural quotes in his writings to further his arguments). He has been described as arguably the greatest logician of the Middle Ages. He lived just prior to the recovery of Aristotle’s major works by being translated from Arabic to Latin, the lingua franca of European Christian scholars at the time. This paper will be a summary of his logic and ethics contributions.

Logic

He has been praised as the greatest logician between the ancients and William of Ockham. Much of what Abelard means by logic can be explained as semantics in the field of philosophy of language. He devises a truth-functional propositional logic. When all is said and done, it is said of his logical system that it seems to lead to inconsistencies in its dealing with topical inference.

In a traditional sense derived from Aristotle, he divides the linguistic categories into nouns and verbs, and they make the sentences. His discussion revolves around common nouns, the main point of the problem of universals. He famously declares that only nouns have universality, having been very much influenced by his first teacher Roscelin, and is credited as the founder of nominalism (the concept’s name comes from the fact that he saw only nouns as universal) in a somewhat older sense. What we came to identify as nominalism would be much more extreme in relation to his starting ideas. He is now categorized as between nominalism and realism.

As part of his philosophy of language, Abelard developed a theory of propositional content, which was well known in the 12th century, thought to have originated with Frege, the occurrence of which is not uncommon with him. His main idea regarding this is differentiating between force and content in propositions. The same content in various forces entails different meanings. In the case of English, changing the word order changes the force of a sentence but not the content. “I am Abelard.” and “am I Abelard?” are cases of assertion and question, respectively, with different forces; but they have the same content. He eventually goes over various forces or attitudes these propositions may take on. For one, he takes conditionals as not asserting the truth of either the protasis or the apodosis, but assertions of the connection between the two propositions. The distinction also leads him to delineate negation and other connectives.

His idea of inference has been translated as entailment. There are complete and incomplete entailments. One example of a complete entailment is the traditional Aristotelian categorical syllogism. He says, the conclusion is contained in the premises and the entailment is not harmed under uniform substitution in a complete entailment. He required conclusions to be relevant and necessary to their premises for them to be entailments. If this is accomplished but the conclusion is not formally valid, then this is incomplete. The rule ‘genus inherits its species’ predicate’ is given as an example of this, uniform substitution in an argument like this rendering the conclusion not valid.

He in the end holds that valid arguments and true conditionals need not correlate with each other, which led the subsequent logicians into much debate. This, nevertheless, did not hold people back from admiring him in the centuries to come. His some controversial ideas even became mainstream with the church’s own adoption of them not too long after his demise.

Ethics

Even though his ethical ideas scattered around can be reconstructed from many of his writings, there are two books of his solely dedicated to ethics that he wrote later in life. Because he wrote these works towards the end of his life and they seem to be incomplete, we don’t know if the missing parts were lost or simply not completed in the first place. One is the Ethics, or Know yourself, where he develops an account of pure intentionalism and the other is the Dialogue Between a Philosopher, a Christian, and a Jew. The first work starts with him establishing the difference between intention and will in their role regarding sin. He expects his readers to be inclined to think will is just as contempt of God, which he says is the sin’s eventuality—there is no harm to God in sinning but contempt of Him. But he proceeds to explain that intention or his somewhat overlapping concept of consent only is morally reprehensible, not will or desire. He puts so much emphasis on intention that even if a person could not follow through with his bad deed that he had put his mind to because of external impediments, he’s still considered as immoral as a person that has done the deed.

He also rejects mental vices (one of the eight parts of behavior he sets out) for determining the morality of a person. He says these are beyond our control and some people simply have more inclination towards certain immoralities. He gives a famous example of a man bound to a bed with two women at his sides. Even though the man did not consent to this, he’s still aroused by the softness of the bed and the women’s touching. Thus Abelard also rejects the pleasure’s in and of itself being bad, which some of his contemporaries propounded. For, he says, if pleasure was inherently bad, it’s on God because he made us in such a way.

The components of behavior other than intention or consent simply go together (they follow the same sequence in every case), in the end having no actual benefit to our determination of them being relevant to the immoral act. Avoiding coming off as a relativism proponent, he develops a complicated form of virtue. He asserts virtue comes from loving God and neighbor, with immorality showing one’s contempt of God and indirectly his neighbors. Thus if one is sure that his act is what God would have liked, then regardless of the action being in actuality bad, it gets the person out of blame. There is the controversial idea of Abelard coming into play here, which he puts forth in the second work: the Jews that crucified Christ were blameless, while their actions prevented them from being fully moral, because one has to have the right action to be fully moral. Nevertheless, they did not know that it was Christ they were crucifying and this puts them out of blame. They merely killed a man that they were sure was claiming wrongly to be the Messiah.

One later component of behavior is voluntariness, a point distinguishing him from much of the ethicists. He sees immoral behavior as irrational and thus not voluntary. He thinks that if a person is sure of an action’s wrongness and is sure he’ll get punished but still proceeds, he is not acting rationally. He wants to do the action, first-order desire; he also doesn’t want to want to do it, second-order desire. He thinks that someone that wants to do an evil act and regards it as such, is irrational because the doer thinks that there is going to be some exceptions regarding his prosecution (This requires some answers). He calls this involuntary consent and the person is still morally reprehensible for this. This person consents to the act without necessarily wanting the punishment that comes with it.

The last component is the act itself, which he does not regard as an essential part of immorality. The same act can be done out of goodwill or as an evil deed. For example, if a judge were to condemn a murderer to death out of his sense of justice, this would be a laudable act. But if the same judge were to have a hatred for the perpetrator and his condemning were to come out of that hatred, this would be an evil act.

References

The Cambridge Companion to Abelard. Kiribati, Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Abelard, Peter. Ethics. United Kingdom, Clarendon Press, 1971.
Abelard, Peter. Ethical Writings: His Ethics Or “Know Yourself” and His Dialogue Between a Philosopher, a Jew, and a Christian. United States, Hackett Publishing Company, 1995.
iep.utm.edu/abelard
plato.stanford.edu/entries/abelard